In an age of climate emergency and social divide, we investigate how the use of design methods in Market Studies can drive positive, real-world change through the development of moral markets. As universities catalyse technological innovation using responsible research and innovation approaches that bring in multiple stakeholders, new opportunities to simultaneously make moral markets have opened-up. Viewing moral markets as dynamic sociomaterial assemblages that seek to deliver value for people and the planet, but are always in the making, implies that Market Studies researchers can engaged in their transformation. Through a focus on design methods, we see how market-studies researcher actively engage in market interventions and transformation activities, and how this activism is shaping our understanding of the future. We draw on a pragmatist perspective on design inquiry, outlining different elements and devices of co-design methodology, and provide an example of its use in Market Studies. We conclude that, in a research environment that demands real-world impact, design methods may come to challenge and complement traditional research practices due to their ability to transform and create new worlds.

Market Studies scholars have adopted a wide range of methods to explore how markets are made and shaped, ranging from traditional ethnographic and netnographic approaches (see, for example, Fernandes, Mason and Chakrabarti 2019; Palmer, Simmons and Mason 2014), to interviews and observations (Mason, Friesl and Ford 2019; Onyas and Ryan 2015) and the use of big data (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016). Despite advances in our understanding of markets generated using these methods, studying markets as distributed, fragmented, multi-site and multi-actor institutions continues to present significant challenges (Hyysalo, Pollock and Williams 2019). These challenges cut across all stages of the research process: from the relationships researchers build with research participants, to the design and deployment of empirical methodological toolkits to collect and make sense of market and market-making data. One way of overcoming these challenges has been for researchers to reconceptualize methods as enabling tools: enabling researchers to identify, uncover and unfold market dynamics and the socio-material arrangements that perform them.